Two Slight Returns: Chauncey Hare and Marianne Wex

Mike Sperlinger

Writing about the poet Aidan Andrew Dun, Iain Sinclair laid out
a contradictory double-imperative: ‘The poet has a dual
responsibility: to give himself over entirely to his work, and
to stage-manage a career.’1 The formula is quintessentially
Sinclairian: Romantic realpolitik. The first imperative might
seem more palatable than the second, which it in any case
excludes with that ‘entirely’ – but palatable only if we prefer
our poets, or artists, to have vocations rather than careers.

For Chauncey Hare and
Marianne Wex, the question of a career, of art as a profession,
was unresolved in ways which have affected the legacy of their
work, and even the legitimacy of categorising them as
‘artists’. While they were contemporaries, making their most
important work in the 1970s, they had little else obviously in
common: Hare was a documentary photographer based in
California; Wex was an artist and art teacher living in
Hamburg. They never met, or exhibited together, nor were they
even aware of one another’s work. But in their choices, the
vicissitudes of their reputations, and the political valencies
of their work, there are parallels which suggest how vocations
can unhinge careers, and how giving oneself over entirely to
the work might mean abandoning it altogether.

*

When Chauncey Hare staged
a one-man protest outside the exhibition ‘Mirrors and Windows’
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, he seemed to
be entirely neglecting Sinclair’s second imperative. The
curator Jack van Euw, who oversaw the 2009 publication of a new
Steidl edition of Hare’s work called Protest Photographs,
recollects being handed a leaflet by Hare as he stood in line
for a lecture by the show’s curator: ‘I read his text and it
crossed my mind that he was a lunatic.’ Hare was protesting,
amongst other things, against Philip Morris’s sponsorship of
the show and the inclusion of one of his images in it. To von
Euw, encountering Hare for the first time, it appeared to be
straightforward ‘career suicide’.2

Hare started out as a
landscape photographer in his spare time, while working at the
Chevron oil company in California. His experiences during a
work assignment in Mississippi during the civil rights
upheavals of 1967 were transformative, for both his politics
and his photography, and the following year he began a series
of portraits of people in their homes which became an
exhibition and later a book, both with the title Interior
America. Working in Oakland, California and the Sierra
foothills, and subsequently in the Ohio valley where he had
grown up, Hare focused mostly, though not exclusively, on
working class homes; shooting with a wide-angle lens, his
images divide their attention equally between the inhabitants
and their decor. They are extraordinary photographs:
compassionate but also formal and complex, constantly
interested in the interiors as sets dressed for living, which
are often themselves full of other framed images on the walls.
Sometimes his subjects are posing, though rarely looking into
camera; sometimes they asleep, or hypnotised by the glow of an
out-of-shot television set.

Subsequently, Hare’s
focus shifted to the workplace and he took images at Chevron
and around Silicon Valley, for a second book called This
Was Corporate America (1985). But, despite receiving three
Guggenheim grants to support his photography, he struggled to
find teaching work and also found himself in conflict with his
employers: he left Chevron, apparently after conflict over his
documentation of the company’s working practices, and was fired
from a position at the Environmental Protection Agency, at
least in part, Hare felt, because of a study he had conducted
into employee morale. Having retrained as a family therapist,
he became a specialist in workplace abuse and published a book
on the subject with his partner Judy Wyatt. He abandoned
photography entirely and his previous body of work remained in
storage until 1999, when he entered protracted negotiations to
donate it to a public institution. Hare’s stipulations – that
the work could never be sold and that it could only be
exhibited alongside one of two explanatory statements he had
written – meant at least one museum turned his donation down,
before van Jack van Euw secured it for the Bancroft Library at
the University of California.

It is hard to think of
many careers less stage-managed than Hare’s. Even in the
afterword to Protest Photographs, van Euw is frank about the
element of self-sabotage: ‘Chauncey was so intent on getting
his message across that he seemed to be stifling any other
interpretation or engagement with his work.’3 Hare had always been acutely
uncomfortable about the gap between the world of his subjects
and the art world where their images circulated:

From the beginning, I
knew that to receive photo grants I was expected to present my
photographs in a formal art way without accompanying text and
to allow each of my photos to be used as a work of art that
stands alone[…]The formal art process dehumanised
the photographs by turning them into purely aesthetic objects.
It allowed and valued only that reality attributed and defined
by the viewer.4

Hare identified himself
with his subjects, and moreover identified his images with them
too – selling prints, he said, ‘would have felt like selling
the people’.5

Hare’s images themselves,
however, are more ambivalent than all this would suggest.
Discussing how welcoming people generally were when he asked to
photograph them in their homes, Hare writes: ‘Easy entry meant
I had a responsibility to honour what I saw and photographed –
especially when I used a wide angle lens that took in more than
what people thought I was photographing.’6Many of the images testify to that slight
deception, and it is part of what makes them compelling, but it
complicates, or qualifies, Hare’s idea of responsibility.
Similarly, Hare’s close identification of the people with their
images is strange insofar as they are not named in the captions
(only the place and date of the photograph, when known). Their
particularity slides into something else – Hare himself calls
them ‘archetypal images of America’.7Protest Photographs shimmers with the
tension between the claim implied by its title and the much
more classical, and irreducibly aesthetic, appeal of many of
its images.

*

Around the same time that
Hare was protesting outside SFMoMA, a very different
photography book was published in Germany. It was by an artist
called Marianne Wex and its full title was ‘Let’s Take Back Our
Space’: ‘Female’ and
‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures
(1979). Wex had started out as a painter, but an interest in
body language had sent her out into the streets of Hamburg in
the early 1970s with her Mamiya camera, where she had started
to take pictures of people unawares at train stations and
street crossings. After she had taken around 3,000 photographs,
she began to sort them according to typologies of body language
and to observe the differences between the sexes. While
continuing to take more images, she also started to research
ancient and mediaeval statuary as a record of previous era’s
‘ideals’, and to plunder contemporary media images
too.

Marianne Wex,
excerpt from 'Let's Take Back Our Space', 1979. Courtesy the
artist

Let’s Take Back Our
Spaceis organised
thematically. The first half of the book focuses on
contemporary images and groups them by posture (‘Seated
persons, leg and feet positions’, ‘Standing persons, arm and
hand positions’, etc.). On the left hand of each spread, images
of men in a given posture run along the top and of women along
the bottom; the right hand spread tends to be sparer, often
reserved for one or two ‘exceptions’ to the stereotypically
gendered gestures. The second half focuses on statuary and
includes a number of short texts on art history, gender and
socialisation, and accounts of Wex’s own
experiences.

As a whole, the book
features a bewildering array of photographic source material:
Wex’s street photographs, photojournalism, advertisements, art
historical reproductions, family album snapshots, pornography,
mail order catalogue clippings, publicity shots, television and
film stills, etc. Wex crops and juxtaposes the images purely
according to their gestural content, and with a ruthless wit –
for example, on page 102 we find a man standing on a field of
bodies, Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, juxtaposed with,
amongst others, a muscleman from a home exercise ad and a
tourist on a Bangkok beach in similar poses. At such moments
her work takes on an affinity with Hans-Peter Feldmann,
otherwise a very different artist, while at other times there
are clear parallels with feminist contemporaries like Martha
Rosler and Sanja Iveković.

Like Hare, Wex’s project
derives part of its dynamic from its apparent contradictions.
Its repetitions and reiterations can make the conventional
postures it is resisting seem archetypal, inescapable; in
defence of individuality, it presents serried ranks of
stereotypes. There is something of Hare, too, in the vestigial
echo of voyeurism: if his images encompass more than his
subjects were aware of, hers were, for the most part,
completely unwitting (which was necessary, as she pointed out,
to capture unconscious postures). And its sheer exhaustiveness
is offset by its idiosyncratic categorisations, the exuberant
subjectivity of its taxonomies. This last characteristic was
something Wex was very conscious of, and understood as an
attempt to overcome the separation between the sciences and
everyday existence: ‘knowledge is gathered in single fields
without checking the relationships within the individual
fields. And all of this happens while bracketing out the
so-called personal feelings’.8

Marianne Wex,
excerpt from 'Let's Take Back Our Space', 1979. Courtesy the
artist

Wex’s project originally
took the form of dozens of large collaged panels, which were
first exhibited as part of ‘Kunstlerinnen International
1877–1977’ at NGBK in Berlin in 1977. It was well received and
various elements of it were included in shows internationally
over the following years, including one at the ICA in London in
the early 1980s. Wex, however, was already turning away from
her art practice by the time the book version of her work was
published. Around the beginning of the period when she began
making Let’s Take Back Our Space, Wex had been diagnosed with a
life-threatening illness; after the book was published she
travelled widely and investigated alternative medicine, during
which time her condition worsened before finally going into
remission. Subsequently, she studied for several years under a
natural healer called Lily Cornford in London, and for the last
two decades she has given seminars on self-healing to small
groups of women all around Europe, often drawing on what she
felt she had learnt during the 1970s about the effects of
comportment on women’s physical and mental health. Her work
served her as a teaching aid, while remaining otherwise out of
circulation.

*

In many ways, Wex’s
project was diametrically opposed to Hare’s. Hare was
concerned, ostensibly at least, with individuals, whereas Wex
was interested in patterns and stereotypes; Hare’s images are
expansive, trying to register every incidental detail, whereas
Wex’s are reduced and cropped to serve illustrative purposes
(some are reversed horizontally, for example, to make the
homologies clearer); Hare’s subjects are always located within
space, whereas the only locus for Wex’s is their own bodies;
and so on.

What the two share,
nevertheless, is a kind of career trajectory: from increasingly
politicised art-making to an abandonment of the role of artist
altogether in favour of therapeutic practices, in the broadest
sense. Hare, as well as setting himself in opposition to the
‘formal art process’, rejects even the label of ‘photographer’:
‘I do not now see myself as a “photographer”, but as a working
person who has made photographs for a short period of his
life.’9Wex,
for her part, ‘didn’t mind if it was called art, any art to me
is research’.10Feeling that almost all of the artistic
and conceptual tools she had inherited were derived from
patriarchal forms, she resolved to, ‘put all my energies in
creating new forms with other women [and] stop concerning
myself with the analysis of the world of men’.11

Abandoning art,
importantly, is not the same as apostasy. Neither Hare nor Wex
has taken the well-established anti-career path of the wayward
poète maudit, glorifying renunciation; we are a long
way from Rimbaud giving up poetry for gun-running. Hare and Wex
both seem to have felt vocations (‘the signals that came from
inside,’ as Hare puts it) that called them through and then
beyond art, at a moment when ‘socially-engaged’ or
‘research-based’ practices were not on the career menu for
artists – while at the same time more contingent factors
(conflict at work, illness) affected their choices. Their
subsequent abandonment of art practice, and of any
stage-managing of their erstwhile art careers, in each case
helped to condemn their considerable bodies of work to relative
obscurity. In fact, their subsequent careers perhaps
retroactively contributed to this process too: therapy and
healing are things contemporary art tends to keep at arm’s
length, perceiving them as too connected to ideas of
instrumentalised self-expression and catharsis.12

Reviewing Interior
America for the New Yorker in 1979, Janet Malcolm
compared it to Walker Evans and Robert Frank’s work, but
concluded cautiously, ‘it is too early to tell about Hare’s
place in photography’.13For over two decades that place has been
very marginal. It is only fairly recently, with the Steidl
publication and the first exhibition of Hare’s work in Europe –
some of the Interior America images featured in the show
‘Anonymes’, curated by David Campany and Diane Dufour, at Le
Bal in Paris last year – that Hare’s work has begun to receive
serious attention again. Wex’s book is long out of print and
the original panels had been in storage at the Bildwechsel
archive of women’s art in Hamburg, until a small selection were
included in a show which I curated for Focal Point Gallery in
Southend in the UK in 2009; the gallery subsequently published
a small catalogue, with reproductions from the original book
and newly commissioned essays.

The strip-mining of ‘lost’ artists of the 1960s and 1970s has
become a small industry. The most telling example is perhaps
Lee Lozano, who made ‘dropping out’ of the art world into a
self-cancelling performance at the time, but whose work has
undergone spectacular reappraisal. But simple acts of
restitution and revaluation, however merited, risk papering
over the fissures into which those artists’ careers had fallen
in the first place – not least because, in many cases, those
fissures remain. The slight returns which are no such a feature
of contemporary art’s relationship to its past should not fool
us into forgetting the gaps, lapses, occlusions and omissions
which necessitated them in the first place.

Similarly, if individual artworks or bodies of work are
‘orphaned’ by artists’ later life choices, then they pass down
to us with a set of perplexingly familiar but intractable
questions: about life and work, intention and history. What,
for example, would Hare or Wex’s images look like considered
instead as part of a life practice, a continuum with what they
chose to do since they stopped making them? Are artists really,
ultimately, responsible for their own reputations? And are we
are any better equipped now than thirty years ago to answer
what it really means to have a career in art – or, for that
matter, to abandon one?

Thanks to Steidl &
Partners for allowing the use of two images from Protest
Photographs by Chauncey Hare (2009).